Pipeline

White Stream, the proposed gas pipeline from Georgia to Romania on the seabed of the Black Sea, is intended to maximize European gas imports from Central Asia through the E.U.-initiated Southern Corridor. The Corridor grand design spans Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, and –with White Stream– also a maritime route to European Union territory via the Black Sea. At its other end, the Southern Corridor is premised on a trans-Caspian link to Turkmenistan for massive European imports of Central Asian gas. READ MORE

If EU policymakers and companies are not going to go to Caspian energy producers with serious offers for their hydrocarbons, Caspian producers will just have to come to the EU. That seems to be the message being sent by Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan as their state energy companies partner to build an oil pipeline heading West-ward. Plans for the so-called Baku-Black Sea pipeline were announced at the Atlantic Council’s Black Sea Energy and Economic Forum in Bucharest on Oct. 2 by Vitaliy Baylarbayov, Deputy Vice President of SOCAR, the state oil company of Azerbaijan. READ MORE

By Sergey Korsunsky, Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador of Ukraine to Turkey

The Prime Minister of the Republic of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said one of those sayings, which perfectly characterizes current role of Turkey within international political and economic arena: "Turkey is the extreme Eastern point of West and the extreme Western point of East". READ MORE

Azerbaijan has apparently decided to play its energy card. As much of the world applauded Turkey's historic rapprochement with Armenia last week, Azerbaijan felt left out in the cold and abandoned by its closest ally. READ MORE

Russia has obtained all the permits necessary to build its 'South Stream' gas pipeline through Turkish territorial waters, discarding Bulgaria as one of the project's transit countries, the Russian press writes. READ MORE

On October 14 in Baku, Azerbaijan’s State Oil Company president Rovnag Abdullayev and Gazprom CEO Aleksei Miller signed an agreement on Azerbaijani gas exports to Russia. The move is a logical follow-up to the June 29 agreement, signed by the same company chiefs –in the presence of Presidents Ilham Alyiev and Dmitry Medvedev in Baku on that occasion– on the main principles of the gas trade between the two countries. READ MORE

On October 19, Turkey, Italy and Russia signed a memorandum of understanding on the Samsun-Ceyhan oil pipeline (SCP). Turkish Energy Minister Taner Yildiz, the Italian Economic Development Minister Claudio Scajola and the Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, inked the agreement that regulates the commitments of the three partners to the SCP. Despite the several signing ceremonies organized in the past for the SCP, the construction work did not commence. READ MORE

Turkey wants to help the EU to realise the Nabucco pipeline project by acting as a broker for securing natural gas supplies from Iraq and Qatar as well as Iran at a later stage, the country's foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu. READ MORE

Inside the European pipeline fantasy that became a real-life gas war with Russia.

When Joschka Fischer's lucrative new job as the "political communications advisor" to a consortium of European energy companies was leaked to a German business publication this summer, there was one comment that stood out. "Welcome to the club," said Gerhard Schröder, an even more highly paid advocate for the other side in Europe's increasingly politicized energy war.

Schröder's remark was short, snide -- and very much to the point. For eight years, the two men had led Germany together, with Schröder ruling as its center-left chancellor and Fischer as his foreign minister. Their long-running partnership had survived a particularly complicated era in post-Cold War Europe, and publicly Fischer had always been supportive, even telling Der Spiegel that Schröder "will go down in the history books as a great chancellor." READ MORE